


Practiced at the Art of Deception

by involuntaryorange



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-04-25 00:04:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4939045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/involuntaryorange/pseuds/involuntaryorange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur wakes up in a room he doesn’t recognize. He doesn’t remember how he got there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Practiced at the Art of Deception

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2015 Inception Reverse Bang, and specifically for monayra/assasyngal's amazing art! Thank you, assasyngal, for drawing something that inspired me to go outside of my writing comfort zone. And thank you, scribblscrabbl, for looking over a draft and making suggestions for how to fix it. :-)
> 
> Warnings: gun violence, sorta? See notes at the end for more info.

 

 

Arthur wakes up in a room he doesn’t recognize. He doesn’t remember how he got there.

He feels groggy — heavy-headed and sticky-eyed — like he’s been drugged. He doesn’t have any apparent injuries. He’s lying on a bed.

His pockets are empty. Whoever brought him here must have searched him, first. 

Good luck cracking the encryption on the cell phone.

The ceiling is a pale yellow. The walls are papered with ancient-looking peonies. The sunlight coming through the window feels vaguely familiar, like a memory lingering just out of reach. 

He sits up with a grunt, closes his eyes until he no longer feels like he’s going to puke. The air smells salty, _feels_ salty on his skin. If he listens closely he’s pretty sure he can hear the ocean.

He drags himself to standing, the floor and his knees creaking under his weight. He exits the room, not bothering to tread softly. Somehow he knows — is it the stillness of the air? — that he’s the only one here.

He scans his surroundings. He’s on the second floor of a house. There are three other rooms on this floor, all bedrooms, all empty. Arthur knows that he should be panicked, that his fingers should be twitching toward his missing gun, but for some reason all of his instincts are telling him that he is safe.

He walks down the stairs slowly, trailing a hand along the weathered wooden banister. It’s cool to the touch, and smooth like driftwood from years of absent-minded caresses. 

The house is airy and suffused with golden light, dust motes dancing in pillars of sunlight. With the lace curtains and the floral sofa, it feels like the home of a cherished grandmother. (Not _Arthur’s_ grandmother’s house — she lived in a dim little garden apartment in Brooklyn.) From downstairs the sound of the ocean is unmistakable. 

The kitchen is small and utilitarian. Behind the glass-front doors, the cabinets are empty. The bud vase on the small round dining table is also empty.

There’s a handgun on the table, too, alongside a folded slip of paper. Arthur reaches for the paper first and opens it up.

 _KILL THEM_ , it says.

Arthur turns the note over. The other side is blank. 

He grabs the gun and finds the front door.

When he opens it, he’s greeted by a warm, sea-scented breeze. There are a few warped wooden steps leading down to sandy ground; the steps are grayed and the sand has worn down the light parts of the woodgrain, leaving slight ridges that Arthur can feel through the leather soles of his shoes. He descends the stairs and heads toward the sound of the ocean.

As he walks, the noise of the waves builds and becomes more complex. What was once a dull, monotone roar is now a symphony: the surf’s throaty churn is joined by the high metallic tinkle of drops of water splashing and the rough susurrus of water receding from spongy sand. Arthur hasn’t been on the beach in years, and he’s certainly never before been on one while wearing a suit. It seems strange to be so covered up when he should be feeling salt-sticky air on his bare skin. He loosens his tie and lets the breeze cool the sweat sheening the hollow of his throat.

He can see two stationary figures in the distance, although he can’t make out any details, silhouetted as they are by the sunlight reflecting off the water. He hides the gun behind his back and keeps walking. As he approaches them, their outlines coalesce into recognizable shapes: two people, sitting in beach chairs at the edge of the water, their backs to Arthur. A man with a tattoo on his shoulder and a brunette woman. They don’t seem to notice the sound of Arthur’s shoes tracking through the sand.

He looks around, scans 360 degrees of horizon; there’s nobody else on the beach.

Slowly, Arthur edges around the figures until he can see their faces, which are slack with sleep. Still hiding the gun behind his back, he clears his throat softly. The figures don’t stir.

He looks at them more carefully. Their chests are rising and falling with soft breaths. They are both strikingly, lushly beautiful. He has no idea who they are. He has no idea why he’s supposed to kill them.

He tightens his grip on his gun and considers his options. He raises his arm, aims the gun, just to see what it looks like. With one eye closed, peering through the sights, he notices the sun glinting off something at the man’s wrist. He lowers his gun. 

It’s a narrow plastic tube — an IV line — with one end embedded in the man’s wrist. The woman is similarly equipped. Arthur traces the tubes with his eyes until they disappear into the water; then he tucks the gun into his waistband at the small of his back and gently lifts one of the tubes so he can keep following it. He works his way along it until he’s knee-deep in the water and seems to be no closer to the origin point.

He trudges back to the shore, his trousers sticking to his calves unpleasantly. When he sits down to remove his sopping wet shoes and socks, he feels a sharp pinch at his neck.

 

***

 

Arthur is drowning, but he isn’t. He _should_ be. He’d held his breath until his lungs were burning, struggling to make it to the surface of the murky water surrounding him, but eventually he couldn’t hold back any more and his urge to breathe overtook his instinct to avoid taking in water.

Except that when he opens his mouth, expecting the sensation of cold, dirty water flooding his lungs, instead he just… breathes. Somehow he’s able to suck the oxygen out of the water, as though he’s merely breathing through damp fabric. He stops thrashing around in a blind panic and tries to evaluate his surroundings.

The water is deep enough that he can’t see the surface, only crepuscular light filtering down through the green-brown murk, catching on specks of grit and algae and tiny drifting organisms. _He_ is a tiny drifting organism, he realizes as he turns and finds only water in every direction. His suit is fluttering around him, dragging in the water, and it’s obviously completely destroyed so he removes his jacket and tie, then his shirt, and watches as they slowly sink into the depths.

Arthur swims. He doesn’t know what direction he’s going, but he has a sense that it’s the right one, and if there’s one thing he learned in the military (which there isn’t; he learned a lot of things in the military) it’s that he should trust his instincts. As he swims, signs of life begin to appear around him: small tropical fish flitting to and fro, tangles of seaweed that slip against his bare torso like strange, slimy fingers.

Every once in a while he could swear he sees something larger darting around out of the corner of his eye, but when he turns his head it’s gone.

He feels a weight pulling him down — something of a compulsion, a comforting press of warmth at his back — and he descends until he can see the ocean floor, thrumming with barely-hidden life. Bottom-feeders scoot around the waving fronds of what could be plant or animal. Mounds of deep-sea coral are scattered here and there, their convolutions sheltering schools of tiny fish.

He swims along, stopping occasionally to inspect an interesting outcrop or to peel off a tenacious strand of seaweed. The water is warmer here somehow, at that perfect temperature where the boundary between skin and water seems becomes blurred, disappears, and Arthur becomes part of the ocean and the ocean becomes part of him. He feels as though — he _feels_ , feels _everything_ , feels the anemones reaching outwards and the currents of fish swimming in the distance and the waves lapping at the shore somewhere very far away.

And he feels something larger, something nearby. Arthur opens his eyes — which he had apparently closed at some point — and discovers that he is no longer alone; there are figures floating around him, other people, swimming in absent-minded circles or dragging their fingers through the silt of the ocean bed. They all seem to be ignoring him, but they’re not conspicuously avoiding eye contact, they’re just looking _through_ him, as though he isn’t even there.

As Arthur scans the crowd, however, his eyes catch on a woman who seems to be staring directly at him. Unlike everyone else, she’s wearing a scuba mask and oxygen tank, and her brown hair is billowing out around her like a halo. There’s something vaguely familiar about her deep-set eyes, but Arthur can’t place her.

She breaks the eye contact to look uneasily around her, and when Arthur follows her lead he discovers that although everyone is ignoring _him_ , they seem fascinated by _her_. The people have stopped their idle swimming and every single person’s eyes are trained on the woman. A few people are approaching her hesitantly, reaching out hands to touch her. She’s hemmed in at all sides, looking slightly wary.

Just as Arthur is considering stepping in to do something — help? intervene? — the crowd suddenly freezes, swiveling their heads in unison, as though they’ve heard something. After a beat, there’s a flurry of movement; the lackadaisical drifting is gone as a hundred figures flee as one, all paddling frantically in the same direction. 

Lacking any better ideas, Arthur follows them. But he hasn’t gotten more than a few dozen yards when he’s yanked back by the ankle. He looks back and sees the woman in the scuba mask, one hand clamped firmly on his leg and a determined set to her eyes. He tries to flail free but her grip is strong; eventually he manages to land a kick to her face, causing her to loosen her grip for a split second, which is all Arthur needs to get away.

He swims quickly, more determined now that there’s someone trying to keep him from his destination (whatever it may be). Once again he only makes it a short distance before he’s yanked backwards, this time bodily and with enough force to disorient him. 

The woman has somehow pulled a net gun out of thin air — thin water, Arthur reminds himself — and shot it at him, ensnaring him in a mass of ropes. She stands back as he thrashes around,watching as he only succeeds in further entangling himself; what little he can of her face looks amused. He tries to curse at her, but all that comes out is a murmur and a flock of air bubbles.

He stills so that he can take stock of the situation: his legs are trapped together, and his right arm is wrenched painfully behind his back. His left hand is pinned by his side.

There’s a knife in his left hand.

He slices through the net and kicks himself free, taking a brief moment to appreciate the surprised look on the woman’s face before he’s swimming away as quickly as he’s capable. He throws a quick glance backward to see if the woman has broken out a torpedo launcher or something, but she isn’t even chasing him, just floating and watching him swim away.

He can just barely make out the stragglers in the distance, and he trails after them. The water gets colder the further he goes, turning icy and foreboding. It somehow feels _thicker_ , putting up more resistance as he slices through it. After he’s swum for what might have been ten minutes or forty, the ocean floor drops away, opening up into a large chasm. Some of the others are lingering at the edges, peering down, but it looks like most of them have gone in.

They continue to ignore Arthur as he propels himself into the chasm, and he doesn’t have to go far before he discovers what it was that everyone was chasing. There’s another person in a scuba mask, this one a man, and he is being utterly besieged. People are clawing at him, grabbing his hair, pulling at his limbs. He’s fighting them off with punches and kicks, but he’s outnumbered. 

Until he pulls out a pistol and starts shooting, sending bodies peeling away from him faster than Arthur can keep track. Arthur knows he needs to do something, needs to save these people and stop the man from killing any more of them, and he’s in the midst of some very rapid strategizing when the man catches sight of him and does a double-take. He fires a few more rounds to scatter the few persistent assailants remaining, then turns tail and flees deeper into the canyon.

Arthur starts to pursue him, but he stops in his tracks when the man swims through a patch of light and Arthur catches a glimpse of a tattoo on his shoulder.

He remembers that tattoo. Why does he remember that tattoo? Why _can’t_ he remember that tattoo? He remembers… yellow. Dust motes in the sunlight. Sweat on the back of his neck. 

He starts to panic.

He doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know how he got there, he doesn’t know how he’s able to breathe underwater, and he doesn’t understand why it didn’t strike him as strange until just now. 

The water is vibrating around him, and when he looks up he can see the other people swimming around frantically as the walls of the canyon start to shake. He’s disoriented and cold and he’s pretty sure he sees whirlpools forming here and there, sucking people into their eddies. Chunks of rock start breaking away from the walls and plummeting into the abyss; Arthur narrowly dodges a sizable boulder, then watches as it crushes the man with the tattoo against a sharp outcrop.

There are blooms of red everywhere, feathering out into the water, and there are bodies floating motionlessly amid the chaos. Arthur tries not to gag; he’s seen plenty of death in his life, but it never gets easier.

Arthur inhales a chestful of water.

 

***

 

Arthur wakes up on the beach, gasping, trying to cough out the water that isn’t actually in his lungs. His trousers are still wet from the knees down. His shoes are still sitting beside him, sodden socks trailing out of them like the lolling tongues of exhausted dogs. 

His gun… his gun is pointed at him, held by the tattooed man, who is now awake. He’s standing beside the woman, who is also awake, and staring at Arthur as though he were a particularly intricate wallpaper design.

She’s the first to speak, in a low French accent. “He is a natural, Edward,” she says, laying a hand on the man’s bare arm. The man — Edward — doesn’t look angry or scared or any other emotion Arthur would expect from someone pointing a gun at him. Rather, he looks contemplative, vaguely satisfied.

“He collapsed the dream on us,” Edward says in response.

“He has no training,” the woman protests. 

Edward sighs. “Fine, Dom was right, but don’t you _dare_ tell him I said that.”

“Could someone maybe tell me what the fuck is going on?” Arthur rasps, feeling strangely left out for someone at the wrong end of a barrel.

The man and the woman look down at Arthur. “What do you think is going on?” Edward asks.

“I have _no idea_. What do you want from me?”

Edward grins. “Ah, Arthur, we’ve already failed to get what we want. But I think we might wind up getting what we need, instead.”

“Now you’re just reciting Rolling Stones lyrics at me.”

At that Edward laughs, throwing his head back and revealing a crooked row of teeth. “Oh, darling, I can already tell you’re going to be trouble.”

“Is that why you’re going to kill me?” Arthur asks, still angling for _any_ kind of information.

“I’m not going to kill you, Arthur,” Edward says, still pointing the gun at him. “And besides, I meant the good kind of trouble.” He winks.

Arthur rolls his eyes, which only makes Edward’s smile grow even wider.

“Let’s give him a little more time to play, hm?” the woman says. Edward nods.

“It’s almost a shame, Arthur. I would have liked to see what you kept in there,” Edward says, and then he’s swinging the gun around and shooting the woman in the head. Arthur screams and leaps forward, but before the woman’s body can even hit the sand, Edward is putting the gun to his own temple and pulling the trigger.

Arthur is so shocked that he can’t speak, can’t move, can only stand there and stare at the two bodies bleeding out into the sand. Eventually he manages a shaky “Jesus _fucking Christ_ ,” and then he picks the gun up from where it fell on the ground, and he runs. He runs away from the bodies, away from the water, runs until the muscles in his legs are burning from digging his bare feet into soft sand, but the beach seems to stretch out infinitely ahead of him. 

 

***

 

Arthur wakes up in the dentist’s office with a pair of latex-gloved hands in his mouth.

 

***

 

Over the next few months, he doesn’t give the bizarre dream-cum-nightmare much thought. His job keeps him busy, between the traveling and the constant monitoring that being head of security for an international bank requires, and even if he had time for introspection, the dream was just some weird side effect of whatever anesthetic the dentist gave him.

The strange part — no, the strangest part — is that Arthur almost _misses_ the dream. It had felt real, somehow realer than real life, and more boundless as well. He’d felt so _connected_ to everything around him. Of course he did, he reminds himself, because he’d created all of it. It had all been part of his subconscious.

Which is why he is surprised, to say the least, when he walks into his hotel suite in Zurich and the tattooed man from his dream is there, leaning back in the office chair with his feet kicked up on the desk.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Arthur goes for his gun. “What the fuck are you doing _anywhere_?” 

Edward holds his hands up and slowly flips open his jacket to show he’s unarmed. Arthur lowers the gun but keeps it at his side, giving Edward the best “don’t fuck with me” glare that he can manage given the circumstances.

“I take it you remember me,” Edward says.

Arthur huffs. “I don’t ‘remember’ you. I’ve never even _met_ you.”

“Well, that’s just not true. Why didn’t you kill us, Arthur?”

“What are you— how could you _possibly_ know about that.”

“I was there.”

“That was a _dream_.”

“Yes.”

“I was _dreaming._ ”

“Well,” Edward says, examining his cuticles, “technically Cobb was dreaming. But yes, we were in a dream.”

Arthur is torn between rolling his eyes and screaming in frustration. “Look, Edward—“

The man grimaces. “Eames, please. Mal’s the only one who can call me ‘Edward.’”

“Eames, whatever. The last time I saw you, you were imaginary, and you put a bullet through your own head, so forgive me if I’m slightly confused.”

“Oh, that’s just the way we get out of dreams early. I didn’t think it would bother you, ex-military man and all. Plus we’d just been pointing a gun at you.”

“You didn’t think it would bother me,” Arthur says, levelly. “You didn’t think it would bother me to see two people die violently and unexpectedly right in front of me.”

“Look, I’ve had enough of Dom and Mal rubbing my misreading in my face, I don’t need you to do it too.”

Arthur closes his eyes tightly and takes a cleansing breath. “Can you just stop being cryptic and explain to me what the hell is going on? What do you mean you were _there_? In the dream?”

“There’s this thing called dreamsharing,” Eames begins.

 

***

 

Eames tells Arthur about dreamshare: he tells Arthur about Mal stealing a PASIV from the French military’s covert experimental _rêvepartage_ program; about how Mal recruited Dom, one of her father’s best students, as a partner, first in business and then in life; about Dom and Mal tracking down Eames in a Kenyan gambling den; about learning how to transfer his forgery skills into a new medium. 

They’re still figuring things out, exploring the boundaries of dreamsharing. They do jobs on spec, selling information after they get it, but they’re hoping that eventually the word will spread and people will seek them out for particular jobs. 

“Of course,” Eames is saying, “the downside of that is that greater awareness of dreamsharing means the possibility of people figuring out ways to fight it. Not to mention the added scrutiny of the law. Right now, even if someone _did_ accuse us of breaking into their dreams, who would believe them?”

Arthur nods from where he’s sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, still trying to wrap his mind around what Eames has been saying. “You still haven’t told me where _I_ come in to all of this.”

“And you still haven’t told me why you didn’t shoot us.”

Arthur throws his hands up. “Why _would_ I? I’m not in the habit of blindly following orders, especially when I have no idea where they’re coming from.”

Eames _hmm_ s.

“Why would you leave a note _telling_ me to kill you?”

“Well, Dom I and had a bit of a bet going.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow.

“I wanted to get the security plans for the bank’s Brussels headquarters out of you.” Eames pauses, watches Arthur for his reaction.

Arthur knows he should be outraged, or terrified, or both. Outraged at the attempted theft, terrified at the fact that it was even possible. Somehow he can’t bring himself to care. He knows how precarious his life was at one point; he knows he could have just as easily wound up on the other side of the law. 

“Dom, on the other hand,” Eames continues, “thought you had more promise than a mere mark. Which _I_ thought was ridiculous, so Dom set up a little test to prove my assumptions wrong.”

“Your assumptions?”

“That you were a military drone. That you lacked curiosity, imagination.”

“You don’t have a very high opinion of the military, do you.”

“Yes, well.” Eames rubs his chest absentmindedly, right over a place where Arthur remembers seeing a tattoo. “I have my reasons.”

“And what would have happened if I’d shot you?”

“We’d have come right back into the dream. Dom was watching the whole time, anyway. He’s the one who sent you into the dream-within-a-dream.”

“What _was_ that? You were in that dream too?”

“People who work in security tend to keep their secrets buried very deeply. We’ve been playing around with introducing a second dream level, getting deeper into the subconscious. If you hadn’t taken me out with that boulder I might’ve gotten the information I wanted.”

“Do you tell all your failed marks about your attempts to infiltrate their subconscious?”

Eames smiles at that, flipping a poker chip back and forth over his knuckles. “No, only the ones I’m trying to recruit.”

“…Recruit?” 

Eames returns the poker chip to his shirt pocket and folds his hands across his lap, looking Arthur directly in the eye. “Yes. Mal was right; you’re a natural at dreamscapes. You took to it like — well, like a fish to water, at the risk of a pun. We want you on our team.”

Arthur stares. “You expect me to leave my high-paying, powerful, _legal_ job to be part of your ragtag team of dream thieves?”

“Yes,” Eames says, simply.

“ _Why_?”

Eames shrugs. “Because you breathed underwater. Because you haven’t shot me yet.”

“Something tells me I’m _more_ likely to shoot you if I wind up _accepting_ the offer.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Eames says, with the grin of someone who knows he’s already won. 

**Author's Note:**

> Elaboration of warning: people appear to get shot and one person appears to kill himself, but it all happens in dreamspace so nobody actually dies.
> 
> Title is from "You Can't Always Get What You Want," natch.


End file.
